Stay connected

At Eternity’s Gate

"Dafoe's elegiac quality hints at why the artist was ahead of his time: because he saw more than anyone else could. It's a towering performance in a movie that casts a magnetic spell." - Minneapolis Star Tribune

“That dude could paint! There are biopics of artists that don’t ask more of an audience than that simple reaction. Not so with Julian Schnabel’s extraordinary At Eternity’s Gate, which features a monumental, career-best performance from Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh. It’s not that Schnabel doesn’t glory in the visions the Dutch painter put on canvas. But Schnabel, renowned as a painter in the way Van Gogh never was in life, wants to get inside the head of this tormented artist and make us see what he sees, as though we’re living his life and not just watching it.

“At Eternity’s Gate is a ravishment of the senses, with cinematographer Benoît Delhomme — a master of the handheld camera — capturing the gorgeous play of sunlight on flowers, wheat fields and anything that else that seized Van Gogh’s attention. It’s also a study of the agony Van Gogh endured in his final years (he committed suicide in 1890 at 37), mad with talent and his own violent delirium to the point of cutting off his left ear.

“There have been dozens of other films about Van Gogh, but it’s Schnabel who gets closest to his subject.” - Rolling Stone